The Presence of Panthers

Last Friday, Ashley and I were at The Myrtles’ Restaurant 1796, having a birthday lunch with a dozen members of her family when the talk turned to—what else—panthers. Multiple generations seem to have had encounters with the large cat known as the Florida Panther on or around the family property, despite the fact that this subspecies of the North American cougar has been officially absent from Louisiana for generations, and even in its namesake state is considered critically endangered. Aunt Frances started it, describing a day fifteen years ago when a big, tan animal, with a tail almost as long as its body, crossed the driveway forty yards ahead of her car. It was broad daylight, early spring just as the leaves were putting out. Frances slowed—as you would—and watched the creature glide into the woods by the roadside where, she said, it stopped and gazed back from amid the still-bare trees for a long moment before slipping away. 

Not long afterward came the night Frances’s granddaughter, Katie, and a boyfriend came rushing into her house scared out of their wits—their eyes wide as saucers. Teenagers at the time, they’d been out rabbit hunting on the same part of the property where Frances had had her encounter, when something big, and close, screamed at them from the undergrowth. These country kids, who had grown up comfortable with dark nights, deep woods, and wild creatures all their lives, fled in terror. 

[Read this—Panther Tales: In the old days, encounters with cougars were common, and sometimes fatal.]

Never to be outdone, Dorcas (Frances’s little sister and my mother-in-law) described a day she and her then-husband were out riding through a big field behind our house in a pickup truck when they spotted a low, tan, long-tailed cat stalking across a wide-open area close to the treeline. Again, this was broad daylight, and the two lifelong outdoorspeople sat holding their breath for more than a minute, watching what Dorcas estimates to have been an eighty-pound animal cross the clearing—its lithe form and long tail distinct against a stand of tall grass behind. 

And then there was Aunt Marguerite—who lived in Baton Rouge but spent every weekend at the farm with her husband, Tom, who was Dorcas and Frances’s uncle. Tom was a keen fisherman who spent his weekends hauling bass from the farm’s ponds. These he would fillet, throwing the bones and heads into the woods behind the pond levee. His wife, an amateur painter, preferred to spend her hours sitting quietly with paintbrush and easel out of doors. One afternoon Marguerite looked up from her painting to see her husband striding across the field towards their cottage, swinging a stringer of fish. Fifty steps behind, matching him stride for stride, came the panther—its nose for fish perhaps having overcome any fear of human contact. Painter shrieked, panther departed. Uncle Tom was prevailed upon to find a more distant place to dump his fish bits.

Does this happen in other peoples’ families? Is everyone spending birthday get-togethers swapping anecdotes about sightings of charismatic megafauna? Or are my wife and I raising children on property infested with large carnivores? There is a third option, which is that I have married into a family of panther-obsessed crazy people, but after twenty-five years living among them I doubt it. Maybe The Myrtles’ reputation for hauntedness brought these stories to the fore, but it’s hard for me to imagine either Frances or Dorcas—both of whom have lived almost all their lives surrounded by these woods and their wildlife—mistaking a deer or a bobcat, much less someone’s overgrown pussycat, for a panther. Is the presence of one a possibility? The farm is surrounded by a fair bit of intact countryside, through the deep woods and pasture of which a large cat could plausibly roam if it were scrupulous about giving humans a wide berth. But we humans, with our game cameras and always-on surveillance systems, are surely increasingly difficult to avoid. Indeed, despite our family’s apparent talent for panther-spotting, no one claims to have seen one in more than fifteen years now. Still, every time I drive down that section of driveway I find myself slowing down to peer into the trees, hoping that one day, there might be a pair of blue-green eyes looking back.